A Comprehensive Call Management Strategy for Congestion Control in Cellular Networks

Congestion in cellular networks during peak hours and at hot spots is a major problem being faced today almost everywhere especially in metro cities. Even though capacity increase seems to be a natural solution to this problem, it is not economically viable due to heavy infrastructure costs involved. As the traffic demand is continuously increasing the problem of congestion is going to remain forever and therefore needs to be effectively addressed. Our proposed scheme tries to address the problem of congestion in cellular networks by introducing a new concept of call duration control coupled with dynamic pricing and call-on-hold principle. Long duration calls in the network is one of the major reasons for congestion in the network. We propose to restrict the duration of such calls depending upon traffic conditions. At heavy traffic conditions the network restricts the duration of ongoing calls upto a specific time beyond which the user has to pay at a higher tariff. At the same time a principle of call-on-hold is also implemented so that if a newly generated call does not get a traffic channel then it is not blocked but is put on hold in a queue hoping to get a channel soon. Our scheme reduces the level of congestion substantially without any compromise with system utilization and at the same time it also marginally increases the revenue per unit time.